Magonia (33 page)

I grab his face in my hands and kiss him until
he
’s the one who can’t breathe. I keep my eyes open. So does he. We’ve been not looking at each other for too long. Like, for our whole lives.

Real now.

No more parentheses. No more brackets.

I can hear new sounds out there. Engines, airplanes, helicopters. Whatever we did, people are about to know it all.

“It’s okay. I planned for something like this.”

I look at Jason, and remember how even though I know what he is, I always underestimate him. He smiles at me.

I stagger into the broken, sideways hull of
Amina Pennarum
, singing camouflage all the way. I know I don’t have long. They’ll never let this wreck stay.

I run as fast as I can through corridors I once knew, past tangled hammocks and twisted ropes to find the skins that Dai took from the Breath ship. It’s dark and smoky in here, and there’s a sizzle not far away, a sting outside, the smell of ozone, but I tear off my uniform and grab the closest skin.

I unzip the cover. I put my hand on the skin, warm, soft, fragile, and I touch it. I feel it touch me. It wraps around me, pressing, crushing, melding to me, melting into me, and inside my body I feel the vibration of Caru, questioning, from outside the vessel.

Okay
, I sing.
Calm,
and I feel him sing back. Feel rather than hear.

The skin closes over me, smooth, perfect, and new, and I tug my clothes back over it and run, run, as the ship collapses around me.

I fling myself out a porthole onto the ice. I look up, but Maganwetar is gone. The ships are gone. The sky and ground are clear of everything but squallwhales and human things, planes in the distance, and cars coming across the island. People are arriving, running across the frozen landscape.

Casually, dressed in my Magonian uniform, breathing a little easier with these borrowed doll lungs, Jason and I walk away from the seed repository.

We walk away like we’re two American teenagers on a field trip who saw something they shouldn’t have seen, but only kind of saw it, officer, because we snuck away to make out.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

It takes some seriously heroic lying and bullshitting, and this
is where having a little bit of money comes in handy, but in the end I get us on a plane home. Fake passport for her. I said heroic, didn’t I? Yes. Heroic.

I’m not entirely well from the lightning, and I’ve been feeling sick the whole flight. It’s weird and terrifying to be on a plane now, after all this. I don’t know if Aza thinks so. She’s so exhausted that she’s been sleeping for nine hours. I can hear a familiar, ragged edge to her breathing starting again, but it’s much better than it has any right to be.

The skin she’s wearing now is stronger, a new version of what she had before. She has some time, we hope, before things start to fail.

The skin
. I think about that. It makes no sense. Aza tried to explain it to me, but finally gave up after she said it was a combination of camouflage and Aqua-Lung. I told her to stop because she wasn’t helping make any sense of this, and she said, “Fine, Jason. It’s magic. I can’t help you. I don’t get it either.”

I think back to that night when Aza and I watched the giant squid—the creature that also seemed fact and fantasy, real and imaginary. That day, we were uncomplicated. I mean, not, but relatively, compared to today. Even that’s something we’re never going to have again.

I’m not looping.

Okay, fine, I’m looping.

Looping as in: this won’t work, this can’t work, what’s coming for us?

As in maybe she isn’t who she was, maybe I’m not who I was, maybe nothing about this is right at all.

As in, maybe she’ll die again. Maybe it will be worse this time than it was last time, except that this time she’ll really be dead.

Loop. Worry. Panic attack quelled by breathing and a pill and a tiny, tiny dose of pi. Shh. Aza not awake and not noticing, and me in the bathroom of the airplane, trying not to fall apart now, after all the weeks of fervent
not
falling apart I’ve done.

This is completely insane. This was love at first sight. And now, she’s here with me, and I’m here with her, and the whole sky is full of angry people who want her dead.

And is she even staying down here? Can she?

But it doesn’t matter. I can’t imagine a universe in which I try to unlove her. What if one day she looks at me and says, “I want to go back up”?

What if I’m an anchor, snagged, holding her to the rocks?

This is not just Jason and Aza. It’s not me racing against death to save her anymore. It’s us racing against impossible.

I think about my moms. I think about how there was a moment in which they thought they’d never be able to be together. Their families panicked. Two women? No men? They did it anyway. My birth certificate has both of them on it, and they did I-don’t-even-know-what to make that happen.

They were brave. I can’t be less brave than they are.

But even Eve would be scared of what we saw in Svalbard. And maybe of the girl beside me.

At the beginning of the flight, I saw a formation of geese passing our plane, going the other way, and so did Aza. She pressed her face against the glass.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. Her hand was on the glass, too, as though she was greeting them, but also like she was getting ready to do something. The air felt gritty. After a moment, the geese passed the plane, and she relaxed.

“What just happened?”

“I wasn’t sure what they were doing,” she said, and looked at me with a kind of sheepish expression on this new face I’m still getting used to. “I thought they might be coming for us.”

“Explain,” I said.

“We’re near a Magonian ship right now,” she said. “The geese were in formation around the hull. I don’t know how we got out of there. I don’t know how they let us go.”

I look at her. I don’t know either. We’ve been over everything. Heyward. The ship in the air. This Dai, her
partner
.

She explained. It wasn’t a happy explanation, hearing her talk about how she was magnetized to him. We compared notes on everything that happened in the last month and a half, and we still have gaps.

There’s nothing hitting the news about what just went down at the vault. I’ve been tracking it the whole flight. About the breach of the seed repository—about the massive earthquake—nothing.

Which means that just beneath the surface,
everyone’s
freaking out. The military from several different countries. Norwegian. American. Brits. Bunch of others. This can only have been an international incident.

I make sure Aza’s sleeping, and then I pull out the business card I was given on the tarmac at Longyearbyen.

She was in the bathroom. Dude came up, black suit, dark glasses, two words, card, gone. I keep nearly, but not quite, telling her about the agent, who only said, “Thank you.”

Now I wonder how long the feds were following me. I keep thinking Aza doesn’t need to know. Maybe no one needs to know.

If I were them, I wouldn’t hire me. I know more than I should. I think if I were in their shoes, I’d kill me.

I look over again at Aza sleeping beside me. I listen to her breathing. We’re going home, but who knows how long we’re going to be able to stay there.

In this skin, Aza looks like a new person. She isn’t. She’s still entirely Aza. Example: when we got onto the plane, she looked at me and said:

“What’re you looking at?”

“You,” I said.

“Don’t get used to this. I think this skin’s gonna fall apart. That’ll be pretty. I’ll look all rotten
corpse and then we’ll see if you want to hold my hand.”

Which is not true. She’ll turn more and more blue, and have a harder and harder time breathing, and eventually what happened before will happen again. And I will still want to hold her hand. We’re just hoping this version is better than what she had before.

She’s got braided black hair and brown skin. Her body’s the same, because the skin shrinks to fit. But other than the obvious changes, because I know she’s Aza, she looks like Aza to me.

Same wide mouth. Same amazing strange eyes. Her voice is Aza’s voice. Her words are Aza’s words.

If I handed her a piece of paper and some scissors, she’d cut out the Empire State Building in three minutes. If I asked her what she thought about anything, she’d instantly have an opinion, whether majorly wrong or not, she’d never hesitate to tell me what she thought. She’s always been this way. She still is.

“How long was I sleeping?”

“Whole flight,” I say.

“Am I still alive?”

“Of course you are.”

“Because it feels like I’m dreaming, coming back here.”

“We’re going to make this work.”

I wish I believed myself. I’ve been the King of Certainty the whole time I’ve known her, but about a lot of things I was faking. I’m faking right now. I don’t know anything. I feel broken and messed up, terrified and convinced I’m about to watch her get shot down by airport security.

Aza kisses me as we’re getting off the plane, full-on enough that I’m pretty sure everyone else in the jetway is blushing, and I’m blushing too. That doesn’t keep me from picking her up and carrying her into the airport, over the threshold that separates this country in the air from home.

Everyone’s laughing, all the people around us. They think we’re cute. Maybe they think we’re a little pukey.

People actually, amazingly, think we’re normal teenagers in love.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

I’m expecting a hole where my house was. My family gone.
Everyone gone. Or it’ll be surrounded by police, or Breath, someone waiting to take me away and lock me up, in a brig or a cell, same difference. My neighborhood looks wrong. No sky around us. No snow. No ice. The ground stable.

I turn the corner toward my address, expecting retribution. Maganwetar knows where I came from. Zal knows where I’ll go. Someone’s got to be hunting me.

Except for that Breath, willfully letting me go. It must have been on someone’s orders. Whose? It makes me wonder if maybe,
maybe
we have some time. If Magonian officials want me down here somehow. I don’t know. I can’t figure it out.

I’m not what I should be. I’m illegal. I’m an alien. In all senses of that word. My mother is an assassin and a criminal and probably in jail in Magonia. Maybe I’m an assassin and a criminal too. I wonder about my father. Do I even have one? No one ever said. How come I never asked?

It’s quiet on my street, but not too quiet. A few birds, none of them speaking. All they do is sing.

The sky’s clear. The sun’s shining. There’s nothing up there that would suggest anyone knows I’m down here. I could almost (if I was insane) forget about Magonia.

Not even a breeze. It’s cold, but not as cold as Svalbard.

And there—my house is there. In front of me, itself. Yellow front door. Blue car in the driveway. Dented side.

It’s the dent that starts me crying. Maybe none of this happened. Maybe I’m just coming home after school, getting out of Jason’s car, probably gasping a little. Normal. Except that I have Jason beside me holding my hand, and that would never have happened before all this. There was no official version of Jason and me before.

There’s a rip in the neckline of his shirt, and he has a smudge on his face. I want to laugh, because a smudge? After everything? Only a smudge?

The world isn’t over, though, and here we are. Like humans. Some more
like
humans than others.

I look up at Jason. I can feel the sides of his fingers against mine. I can feel his heart beating through his thumb.

“What do you think?” he asks me, as though he doesn’t know already.

“My parents are home,” I say.

“You ready?”